Catching up...I started three months ago.

This project began back in December 2010 when I bought some wood from eBay. More about that later - there's some catching up to do as I only decided today to record my progress.

Hopefully, my thoughts and decisions and the results of years of research and tracking down supplies will help somebody to realise their own dream of building a camera. I'll post links as I go.

When you start to think about building a camera, there are a lot of decisions that you think you have to make before you start. So many that it took me thirteen years to get started. It really doesn't have to be like that. When you turn the whole thing inside out, you begin to see that no decision is irreversible - these cameras are more-or-less modular. What starts life as a monorail camera can easily become a field camera - I still don't know what mine is going to be. Similarly, a 4x5 camera can be adapted to 5x7 and vice versa. Of course there may be some compromises and inefficiencies, but having a camera that doesn't quite do everything you want is much better than only having a camera in your head.

While I've read around a lot and looked at hundreds of pictures ( just google "field cameras" and click the images button ), perhaps the biggest inspiration was Jon Grepstad's downloadable book, 'Building a Large Format camera'. He goes into quite some detail about how to build a monorail camera with few tools and skills.

I think the two things that will hold up most people are the bellows, specifically material for the bellows, and the metalwork. Probably the reason a lot of builders build monorails is that they are stumped by the focussing mechanism. When you finally manage to track down a rack and pinion, the prices seem ludicrous. Call me a cheapskate, but I'm not going to spend £80 or more on a steel rack. As we'll see, these problems are not insurmountable. The important thing is to get started, the rest can take shape or change as it happens.

And now, here's a picture of progress so far. I'll explore the individual parts retrospectively in future posts.